Retracted: Le PKK, vecteur d’émancipation des femmes kurdes de Turquie ?

Abstract

Both the media and academics have shown increased interest in Kurdish women combatants since the 2000s, yet without always basing themselves on primary source data. In order to understand whether this engagement coincides with a process of emancipation, we have carried out a qualitative sociological survey with 28 female combatants involved in the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK). The originality of the research is twofold. Firstly, it addresses the question of emancipation as such, rather than that of equality or gender relations. Secondly, it is not based on a study of official Party discourse but on the retrospective accounts of women activists. This perspective allow us to grasp the limits of the appropriation of the official discourse of women’s liberation, as well as its impact on the individual trajectories of commitment and the self-narratives of women fighters. If the weight of gender relations in the patriarchal society intervenes in the commitment decisions of the second generation of activists, the theory of the Free Woman only intervenes in the justificatory discourse of the last generation of women guerrillas.

Keywords

• political commitment
• terrorism
• PKK
• Kurds
• emancipation
• theory of the Free Woman